1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the field of telephony, and more particularly, to the use of voice browsers for telephony services.
2. Description of the Related Art
A voice browser typically operates in conjunction with a speech recognition engine and speech synthesis engine and permits a user to interact with network-based electronic content audibly. That is, the user can provide voice commands to navigate from network-based electronic document to document. Likewise, network-based electronic content can be presented to the user audibly, typically in the form of synthesized speech. Thus, voice browsers can provide voice access and interactive voice response to network-based electronic content and applications, for instance by telephone, personal digital assistant, or desktop computer.
Voice browsers can be configured to interact with network-based electronic content encoded in Voice Extensible Markup Language (VXML). VXML is a markup language for distributed voice applications and is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and Dual Tone Multifrequency (“DTMF”) key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed-initiative conversations.
Due to the extensive functionality provided by voice browsers, telecommunications product and service providers have begun utilizing voice browser technology to provide telephony services and/or features. For example, voice browsers can be used in the context of interactive voice response systems. Presently, however, voice browsers suffer from several performance related deficiencies. In particular, voice browsers typically are implemented as a single application operating on a single computing machine. Such conventional voice browser implementations are unable to process high volumes of calls or support the number of speech sessions necessary in a high volume call processing environment. In addition, once implemented, a conventional voice browser cannot be scaled according to the demand. In consequence, as demand increases, the performance of a conventional voice browser begins to decline.